It is often said that there are no new ideas. If you ever do come up with something that seems wholly new and unique, a little digging will usually reveal that some dude in Idaho thought of it thirty years ago. So maybe it’s not surprising that Facebook, Google and Flickr have now completely given up on innovating, and are now just stealing ideas from each other as fast as their legions of developers can type code.

I’m sure they stole the idea from someone else ages ago, but Facebook has long allowed users to tag uploaded images with people’s names. So if you go out on a bender with your pals and take lots of embarrasing photos of them, you can attach their names to the pictures. It may not help your pals’ future employment prospects, but it’s awfully fun. So fun, that Flickr has now, finally, got into the face tagging game. Given their position on the cutting edge of photo-soci-media-lizing, it’s a bit surprising it took Flickr this long to steal coincidentally come up with the idea themselves.

Meanwhile over at a place that is rightly known for innovation, Google is set to launch a new product called Social Search. It allows you to import friends and feeds from all your profiles on various social networking sites, all into one place. Which is cool. And which is also almost identical to FriendFeed, a service that was acquired by Facebook earlier this year.

And last but not least, both Facebook and Google have decided to start selling music online. Granted, the idea of offering songs for sale isn’t exactly a new one, or innovative in any way. But it is another example of how a lot of the big destination sites online aren’t coming up with new stuff, but just picking and choosing features and ideas that work elsewhere, and then throwing them up as new product offerings.

None of this is super surprising, of course. Every time something works well in business, a lot of other companies take notice, and try to think of ways to adapt that successful model into their own offering. But what is interesting is how quickly and blatantly it all happens online, and how it sort of feels like we’re about a year away from a world where you’ll be able to do every possible thing you desire online without ever leaving Google.

Related posts:

1. Is Facebook ripping off Twitter (again)?
2. Post Photos, and Profits, on Flickr
3. Small companies marketing with social media too

Tags: face tagging, Facebook, Flickr, Google, Social Media

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